Buck-Tick Zone

1986

All of Buck-Tick's members moved to Tokyo and started becoming popular in the underground scene, known as "Indies" in Japan. They played at the "Beat For Beat For Beat" series of unsigned band gigs held at Shinjuku Jam throughout the year. As far as what exactly becoming popular means, Hisashi recounts in an interview that at first they had perhaps 30 people at a show and then after they were mentioned in a magazine, they would have around 80 people at a show and built it up from there.

In April, "Doll" magazine published Buck-Tick in their newcomer's profile corner. I believe this was their first appearance in a magazine.

The band decided to record a demo and were able to get into a Yamaha studio at a fair price because of a connection Toll had from his days in SP through Popcon. The cost of the studio was 100,000 yen, which came down to 20,000 per member. That was quite a lot of money for them but they somehow managed to come up with the money. They were unfamiliar with the recording process and recorded what they thought to be their four best songs ("Plastic Syndrome II", "To-Search", "One Night Ballet", "Secret Reaction") in one day (around May 18). [Note: "Plastic Syndrome II" was later named "Plastic Syndrome Type II".]

(As far as how poor the band was during those days, I recall an interview where they said that when they started out, they had so little money that after shows for food they could only afford to buy one takoyaki and had to split it between not only the members of the band but their one roadie as well. There are also tales of Hide only eating miso because he was so poor. And then of course there are the various tales of odd jobs they held.)

The head of the famous Japanese indie label Taiyo Records, Kazuyo Sawaki, saw them at a gig in Shibuya on June 28. He loved it enough that he contacted them by phone. When they met he told them that they would definitely sell and eventually they were signed.

Buck-Tick released a single with the A side of "To-Search" and the B side of "Plastic Syndrome Type II" on October 21 through Taiyo Records. The version of the songs were extracted from the demo they had recorded themselves in May. The following day they held a single commemoration gig at Shinjuku Loft. (I have read that two days before the single's release they sold some "handmade" records at a show. This is the only time I have heard of self-made records and may have just been the single sold in advance of the release date and called handmade due to the self-financed recording. Any selfmade Buck-Tick recordings would be an extremely rare item to own.)

Buck-Tick was getting pretty popular in the indie circuit. In fact, in November the first Buck-Tick fanclub newsletter was in print. It was called "Full Volume" and ran for 4 issues. They featured member profiles, member equipment soundchecks, and gig reviews.

[this page was last updated on Thursday, 17-Jul-2008 22:42:22 PDT]